


dissolution

by tallykale



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, M/M, brief mentions of self harm & suicide, essentially this is me projecting onto fiddleford: the fic, i feel so bad im sorry fiddleford you deserve better than this, talk of intrusive thoughts/compulsions/impulses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 14:03:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5130329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tallykale/pseuds/tallykale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They started, took root, among subpar universities and demons in turn; an inauspicious first step, which could have been a warning, had one of them wanted to look longer. Everything comes apart, as much as he wants to forget that fact.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dissolution

**Author's Note:**

> a lot of this is just me projecting my Brain Problems™ onto characters who sorely deserve better and for that i'd like to apologise not only to you, the reader, but also to Fiddleford. i just want him to be happy and yet i write things like this.

Here is their beginning, and his end: the dissolution of something into another, and the falling apart of the world around them.

Somehow, this is where he is: Fiddleford is taking a deep breath and touching a trigger and exhaling and putting down a gun. (Not a gun as deadly, per se, as one that sends a bullet into his frontal lobe, as he has thought about, once or twice or more; but perhaps more frightening in its function, in the end.) He picks it up again after a moment and holds it, gently, but fearfully. The keypad seems to try at intimidation, asking him _Could you actually do it, really? Try your hand at heartlessness, for once, because don’t you deserve to take something from the world? From him?_

_From yourself?_

He puts it down again.

He doesn’t answer the accusatory green blink of the input with S-T-A-N-F-O-R-D, not yet, as much as he wants to (and hates the wanting just as much). He toys with the idea of typing L-O-V-E, and using what remains afterwards as a measure of how he should feel, but he knows that he wouldn’t like the result, no matter which way it cut into him: if he doesn’t remember anything, the past year hollow like a wound rotted clean, then the absence of something can be as painful as the alternative, can’t it? Knowing that whatever used to be there was real and living with that knowledge, pasted over the gone memories, might take more out of him than he can stand. How much of his life is intertwined with that golden thread, and how much of him would be left if he pulled at the fraying edges until it came undone?

But if he opens his eyes and nothing changes, and he can see it all like it happened in vivid harsh-bright colour, then that might be the worse of it: remembering, and knowing that even while he lived them, those memories were lies and sickly sweet sugar, bitter in his stomach and throat and teeth after the fact. Cavities are cavities despite anything he might pretend otherwise, and maybe they were both bleeding out the mouth, after a fashion.

The gun is still in front of him, and the plans for another– improved, more efficient, in theory– are spread on the bench behind, curled at one corner. He thinks and cries for a few minutes, curled in on himself in his chair, and then thinks and thinks again.

Right now, he knows that he’d rather cut his hands on stained glass than pretend his heart was never a church at all, and it hurts him with how much he hopes that the same aching thought is humming through the mind of someone who used to be with him in the pews. (Did their fingers really ever hold a songbook as tightly as he thought, or was his grip slipping even then? If their voices never cracked on the high notes of the hymns, and they never looked the wooden-carved saviour in his wooden-calm face and thought sapling-fresh thoughts together, and they never shunned demons and muses alike, then was the worship anything more than blood and symbols in an empty room?)  

But right now is only right now, after all. Things can change, as he so painfully knows now. (He counts out a rhythm on the table with his fingers, sketching a square’s four corners, until it hurts. If only he could get it _right_ , he thinks, though if he was asked what right meant, he wouldn’t be able to say; but getting a loop right would fix everything, inexplicably.) The table is laden with materials, and if he focuses, he can pick out the outline of a cross. It awaits his sacrifice, probably, even though there won’t be a tomb three days later to rise from, or even a death to overcome.

Something about the religiosity of his tangents makes him want to laugh, surrounded by such sharp science, and, inside, such burning irrationality.

* * *

The design has been spinning in his mind for months; first, as an offhand theory, and then as an unwelcome visitor into his thoughts when he is reminded of things he avoids thinking on. Sometimes it’s when he remembers, deep down, that people are selfish, and no amount of love or science heaped on someone can change that, and he wants to forget the bitter sting he feels when Stanford turns away from him to check equations or hunt monsters or solder metal to metal in the dark with sparks like eyes watching him. More often it happens when he smells the blood in the air or catches a yellow iris and a grin in the shadows– because if a demon can’t exist physically, with a body and a beating heart, is it just a memory in the making as well?

He hopes so, and turns over an early prototype in his hands, and then destroys it. (Meticulously, thoroughly, but leaving everything intact at some level.) Acting on impulse never suited him, really.

And here is a word that scares him down to his naive bones: impulse. He’s no stranger to those dark thoughts that slip in and whisper in his ear, unbidden, things like _it would be so easy to put that match to your skin instead of the candle, you know_ , or _make yourself forget everything and start over, like you deserve, really_ , or, the one that sends him shaking over the porcelain sink until things feel real again, _you have the makings of it, so why not use it to cut the demon out of your life and his the same; and if he hates you for it, then isn’t that just the way things need to be?_

There was a time, once, when he looked in the mirror and had to press his fingers into the corners of the medicine cabinet in time (one-two-three-four, make-things-all-right, please-just-once-more, this-keeps-you-safe) and only stopped when he was bleeding from three fingertips, and bit at the unbroken one to make it even.

It went like this: symmetry and blood in the bathroom at four in the morning, to wash the taste of those thoughts from his entire being, and this always, always held carefully out of sight. (Patterns and loops weave through his life like a hunted thing, the fruitless chase of perfection in these tiny rituals; they’re deeply connected to the thoughts, either as a cure or a cause, and that scares him more than he can say. He can never explain it and he never wants to try, because there are so many things he is afraid of, and his own mind accounts for a worryingly large percentage of the list titled Things To Never Think About, Ever.) Then: bandaids in the medicine cabinet (he taps out four more loops when he swings the mirror open, but only that) and washing away the redness, turning off the light, and finally he can sink, hollow, back into bed. Fiddleford is twenty-seven. He feels seventy.

It takes him a moment to find his voice, then, in the space that should have meant safety, but feels more like admitting defeat. “You awake?” is what he settles on, eventually, after excising the more doubtful routes of breaching conversation in the dark. ( _Do you mind if I interrupt our sweet domesticity with my own problems?_ and _Can I ask you how it feels to have someone else in your head, because I’m genuinely worried I might be possessed and just unaware of it, but the saying of it just makes the demon more real?_ and even _Do you love me, really, even though sometimes all I think about is blood and burning bridges?_ are all filed away, maybe, for another day.)

“Mmm?” Stanford is warm and quiet and even his tired acknowledgement feels like comfort. There might be a mumbled term of endearment in there, too, and despite everything it makes Fiddleford smile. “What’s the matter?” He sits up slightly and blinks at him myopically, concern fringing at his features, and leans in closer to the cold side of the bed. He is, in any case, a veritable heater, no matter the thoughts that Fiddleford breaks his skin over, and so they bend closer together, Stanford curling one hand at his partner’s hip, the other gently twisting fingers together. Some sort of calm settles in him, thinly.

“Just– worried, about some, um.” He stammers and realises he doesn’t actually know how to talk about this; maybe one of the more direct approaches was better, after all. _Sometimes I get thoughts, or I think thoughts, or thoughts are thrust upon me which scare me, because they’re bad thoughts, with blood and violence and immoral things, and I don’t want to be a bad person. Am I a bad person, do you think?_ He doesn’t say this, and then he breathes, and he does say it. The words sound just as awful as they did in his head; maybe worse, clashing in the silence of their bedroom and making his problems so much more real, because saying something out loud is a subtle magic.

There’s a long pause– too long, and he wonders for a moment if Stanford has fallen back to sleep, leaving him alone in the dark– but then the hand at his hip twitches and pulls him closer. “Intrusive thoughts,” says that measured voice, like it’s the answer to everything in the pre-dawn sopor. “They don’t make you evil, Fids, because that’s not who you are.” He presses a sleepy kiss to his partner’s jaw, where it burns like a solitary star; Fiddleford absently brings a hand to it and the bandaids on his fingertips snag on his skin. “What’s important is what you _do_ , not the thoughts that happen to you.” And that’s a small comfort: telling himself that the thoughts happen to him, rather than him being the one to cause them, slows the jagged cycle of blame and punishment he finds himself caught in too often. (More loops, and more and more to fix it, and then more to fix those.) “And I do think you’re a good person, love. You’re the best thing in my life, you know, and I’ve always thought that.”

Somehow, he doesn’t have anything to say to that, except for a murmur that might have been “I love you,” and his lips pressed to Stanford’s collarbone. The kisses they leave each other are a binary system until the dawn; their orbit makes the thoughts just a bit quieter, but not gone, not quite.

It goes like this: he wants to spit out the memory like a sour thing.

* * *

Here he is: the plans are spread in front of him, wire and metal and crystal sprawling like veins, nerves. He cracks his knuckles, and shakes them out and cracks them again, worrying at the last one until there’s a belated click. Over the past day, the machine has been taken apart and reassembled a full nine times, until his palms are raw from the scraping of panels. It’s halfway there now, cut open in surgery.

Fiddleford moves to pull a wire from its housing, and then stops. Drums his fingers on the bench in a pattern and frowns, savage, when his always-stuttering heartbeat makes him misstep.

Stanford wasn’t home today, but his body was: laughing in the stairwell and scraping nails– claws– along the wall while he spoke, too shrill and excited. Fiddleford still itches from thoughts and the day knots up when Bill is there, and he always feels bare before the demon: like his impulses ( _intrusive thoughts_ hums Stanford’s easy tone through his head, continuously) are visible, and they flourish under Bill’s perverse encouragement, something twisted grown to seed. _You’re right, Fiddlesticks, those knives are pretty sharp! Take one to flesh and we might find out what sharp really means!_

He wants to forget that voice and how it twists Stanford’s lips. He wants to forget the way he looks at him, like something dying but with some entertainment still left in its bruised and blistered body; like Bill’s about to pounce and maim. And, most searingly, he wants to forget the new shape their lives have become, with a wedge hammered in where it was never meant to be. But: he fights the thoughts and the trigger-twitch of his finger (cracks the knuckles again, as a compromise, instead of breaking them) and tells himself that he’d never do that, it’s not who he is, the thoughts are happening to him to him _to_ him, not because of him. Fiddleford can feel every neuron firing in his brain like a gunshot, and it’s harder every day to know the difference between thoughts that happen to ( _break your fingers shoot him destroy your life draw blood blood blood_ ) and thoughts that happen because ( _make yourself forget make him forget make everyone forget so you can stop hurting_ ).

The nights get longer, the binary stars glow dimmer. Slit pupils crack open his skull. He builds and takes apart and creates and destroys and gives in and keeps fighting. Sometimes he and Stanford sleep, skin pressed together, peacefully; more often than not, however, the evenings end with Fiddleford lying alone, thinking of the sounds coming from downstairs: construction, or conversation, or both. He hasn’t spent any substantial time– awake, both of them fully themselves and alone together– with Stanford in days, and the chasm feels like breaking bones.

The temptation of forgetting makes him stare at the completed machine (prototype only, he reminds himself, never really finished) for longer and longer each time, and by the time the ground starts shaking, he’s already left it fully assembled on the bench for a week.

* * *

It happens, as these things do, with blue light and unsure footing.

Fiddleford has it in the back of his mind that maybe after this is over, Stanford’s curiosity and weirdlust satisfied, they can go back to how things were, without a demon on both their shoulders. (If only there was an angel to balance him out, he thinks, then maybe they’d both have made better decisions.) That maybe once the portal is completed and its unknown depths are plumbed for whatever truths really lie beyond, and their lives aren’t lit by an eerie blue glow at night, he can fix things without having to rely on loops and loops and loops.

But maybe _maybe_ is a useless word, and he should have learnt that by now.

Because you can say things like _maybe_ things wouldn’t have gone wrong if he’d stepped back an inch, or _maybe_ he was just assuming the worst of something his partner trusted implicitly, or _maybe_ they could have fixed things anyway, eventually, but saying it doesn’t make the impossible any more true.

“Ready? And…” (He wonders, distantly, how many times those words have been someone’s last. Not Stanford’s, at least. Not this time.)

And so it happens: the end of it. Of them.

Even while it’s going on, it’s like a series of snapshots as the camera falls from numb hands: a rope pulling tight around his wrist; light so bright and burning and everywhere that he can hear and feel it; language that tastes like tar in his bones when it rings in the air, and something like demons all around and through him– and then it’s slow again, lethargic. Gravity and familiar hands pull him down to earth.

Words– barely that, barely sounds– crawl up from his throat and spill out of his mouth as the snapshots flash behind his eyes, again, and again.

Stanford’s voice– pressing, too hard-edged for Fiddleford’s fragile heart in that moment– is there suddenly, and Fiddleford says something in reply, accusatory and sharp, but can’t recall the exact words after they leave his mouth; there’s a metallic harshness in his throat that he tries and fails to swallow away, and he doesn’t know if he imagines the dizzying tangle of letters that runs, frantic, across his vision. (But he’s also never sure if he imagined the embrace, or the gentle hands on his shoulders, cradling him. If he knew whether that was real– what would it change, in the end?) The basement is cold and quiet and terribly, awfully empty, and then– it breaks, somehow.

He snaps back to himself when he jolts away from Stanford’s touch, away from the vestiges of whatever they could have had, for the last time. The words are too cruel and too kind at the same time: “I quit,” and he leaves, walking stiff-kneed towards the door, to the elevator, to the surface. The last minute that he stays in the house is spent grabbing the assembled gun from the table in his room and feeling it press, real, into his hand.

Maybe he hesitates for a moment, or it’s just that things are off-colour and never like the movies, but when he slams the front door behind him, his foot lags; it bounces back from his heel and gapes open as he moves from _there and with him_ to _gone gone gone_ , and things can’t be fixed with cracked knuckles anymore.

(But if maybe is such a useless word, why does he waste so much time wondering if _maybe_ Stanford could have been calling after him?)

* * *

And– this is the way it comes apart, in the end. This is why he sits in front of the bench a week later, resolve steely in his mind and steel cold in his fist.

“My name is Fiddleford Hadron McGucket,” he says, clinical and cold and straightforward, knowing that the machine is the only one who could be listening or caring, or ever will care, “and I wish to unsee what I have seen.” There’s more he says: context for the situation, but even that feels like a lie; he leaves out any mention of demons or love, and pretends that he isn’t about to cry again. (The nightmares are the worst of it, apart from the empty bed, in the tiny room he rents. They’re either swirling fire and demons and nauseating momentum or Stanford’s face, and both end up with him sitting up in bed, sweat just as cold on his flushed skin either way.) The gun is primed with the words O-T-H-E-R D-I-M-E-N-S-I-O-N; for once, Fiddleford gives into the thoughts completely, and touches the metal to his temple.

For once, he actually pulls the trigger.

And–

It’s like blinking, like the negative space between a breath, and he opens his eyes again to the same world. There’s something– a handful of memories pulled from the roiling mass, leaving his head feeling strangely empty: a sip taken from an overflowing wine glass, poison siphoned from a wound. Either metaphor works, he guesses, because in the end the only thing that matters is the fact that the space of time between his feet leaving the ground and Stanford’s hand on his shaking, feverish shoulder is gone.

Which means that it worked. (Which means that whether it was wine or poison doesn’t matter, because he can’t remember, and never has to again.)

* * *

He finds excuses to forget other things, in time. Why remember the building of the portal, anyway? It may have been good hard work, but it was soured by the presence of– why remember demons, anyway?

The trigger becomes crushingly familiar; he doesn’t disassemble the gun anymore. Things feel slightly off-kilter, like when he was hunting with Stanford and the air would shimmer with mystery, and– why remember adventures, anyway?

His nerves are shot, and that makes him shake and tremble and undo all of his world-saving loops, and– why remember loops, anyway?

A woman with haunted eyes starts at his jerky movements when he goes out to buy groceries, and she confesses in a hushed whisper that she’s still jumpy from seeing something dark and looming in the lake yesterday, and he convinces her– why remember monsters, anyway?

He’s broken his arm, from forgetting how far it is from the window to the ground; his face is overtaken by a beard that adds decades to his appearance because he forgot how to shave in the course of forgetting blood; his son slammed the door in his face and left without a word at the sad echo of his father, at the way he’s forgotten how to hold himself, how to be Fiddleford Hadron McGucket. Even the first forgetting is hazy: memories he doesn’t remember erasing are harder and harder to recall. He cradles the gun like a child against his cast, against his shallow chest, and keeps forgetting.

And on and on and on until the only solid things in his mind are the gun and the tattered silhouette of Stanford.

In the end– it comes down to impulse. But don’t all things, really?

Fiddleford comes undone at the edges and he cuts a loose thread on stained glass and he intentionally leaves a loop unfinished and punishes himself by aiming the gun at his head and forgetting how to love.

Dreadfully poetic, perhaps, that forgetting one person is the straw that broke the camel’s back: in his case, the removal of a pine tree is what makes him fall apart. If he’d studied literature in university, he might have been able to draw something more eloquent out of it, but by the next month, he’s forgotten that he ever went.


End file.
